Calculating resistance for corrugated wire

[Fudgey Finger]

Hello fellow builders. I was just sitting down to make a pair of corrugated staggered staple fused claptons and I realized something. If I try to use steam engine or vape tool to calculate the resistance of my desired build, it will not be accurate because these programs assume that your ribbon is straight. If I want to make 12" of finished coil, I will need to cut 15-16" pieces of ribbon to run through the crimper. So even though I will be using 4 pieces of .4 ribbon, they have more mass than what these coil calculators think they have.

What can I do in these calculators to get closer to the true resistance or the final coil? I was thinking that even though I am using .4 ribbon, I could enter .46 into the calculator, because crimping makes the wire about 15% shorter, but I don't want to go through all of this work making the coil to just have it ohm too low in the end.

I apologize if any of that was worded poorly. I would really appreciate any help I can get on this. Thanks all.

 

[rsimpson]

What I do is use the Custom Materials functionality of steam engine. One way you could do this would be to take a piece of crimped wire and test (or calculate) the resistivity of wire and plug that in as a custom material. The way to calculate it would be to take a 1 centimeter piece of crimped wire and straighten it back out to determine the actual length, then multiply by the resistivity of the actual wire. For instance, let's say a 1cm piece of crimped .4 stainless steel ribbon flattens out to 1.2cm. The resistance for .4 stainless steel is 0.01875 ohms/mm take that number and multiply by 12 then devide by 10 and that would give you the resistance of the crimped wire per mm. in this case it would be .0225.

The easiest way would be to take a piece of crimped wire and measure the resistance using a multimeter and plugging in that number as a custom material.

Using a custom material in a calculator tool won't be perfect, but then again the results of a calculator in general for a standard material aren't perfect either.

 

[Fudgey Finger]

Thanks a lot! I didn't realize you could enter custom materials. I really appreciate the help.

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